Pages

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

The Void and Its Dis-Contents: Aristotle's Nature at the Limit

(Here's another seminar paper, this time about Aristotle and... well, Badiou and Zizek, who always crop up in all my academic work no matter how hard I try to escape!)

The Void and Its Dis-Contents:

Aristotle’s Nature at the
Limit

I. Introduction

In
Physics
IV, chapters 6-9,1
Aristotle deals with the question of the void. It would not be too
great a stretch to claim that Aristotle is here at his most dense and
difficult, but also at his most sophisticated. After spending those
several chapters providing myriad arguments against the existence of
the void, he makes a statement that is frankly shocking: “From what
has been said it is clear that there is no distinct void, neither
simply, nor in what is rarefied, nor potentially, unless
one wants to call the cause of being moved in general ‘void’”
(Phys.
IV.9,
217b23; emphasis mine). This odd conclusion is not unprecedented, for
earlier in the same book Aristotle writes: “For this reason, some
say that the void is the material of body (these also say that place
is this same thing), but they do not speak well, for the material is
not separable from the thing, but they inquire after the void as
separable” (Phys.
IV.7,
214a16). And yet Aristotle himself does not treat this question
directly or in a thorough-going way, instead being content with the
above-cited “unless,” with an off-handed post-conclusion remark.

What
are we to make of this strange state of affairs? In order to see the
significance of this “unless,” and thereby to understand and
resolve the issue, we must have a clear understanding of the function
and possible implications of the void within Aristotle’s broader
project of physics, that is, his own unique brand of natural
philosophy. Then, we must understand Aristotle’s reasoning for
rejecting the void within this context. After that, we will be in a
position to evaluate the meaning and significance of the “unless.”
This will necessarily bring us adjacent to contemporary materialisms
of the void, as well as necessitate a look at Plato’s unwritten
doctrines.

II. Nature & the Void

Aristotle’s
account of physics is not merely that of a pre-modern scientist, as
if he were a less-developed form of a modern physicist. He belongs,
rather, to a different paradigm that is neither reducible to modern
physics nor intelligible by the same criteria as the modern
scientific method. While Aristotle is also investigating “nature,”
he is using that term in a rather different way. This section will
explore the paradigmatic context
of Aristotle’s thinking of the void by reference to the concepts of
nature and place, and by way of contrast to the common contemporary
meanings of some of his key terms. While necessary, this section will
be brief, since discussion of the void itself will take up the bulk
of this paper.

Near
the beginning of his exposition, Aristotle rejects the Parmenidean
way of approaching the question of what is; the method of proceeding
advocated by Parmenides and his followers is “not according to
nature” (Phys.
I.2,
185a1). Why is this? They begin not in the phenomenon of what they
aim to explain, but in abstract logical principles, in the end
completely contradicting appearances. Nature, in the first instance,
is motion,
since it appears as
motion,
or as moving things (Phys.
I.2,
185a15). There is for Aristotle a fundamental connection between
nature and motion that can never be severed, based on a
proto-phenomenological attitude toward philosophical investigation;
in fact, the Physics
is entirely concerned with motion and its causes, as well as the
aporias and corollaries that accompany such theories and phenomena).

An
important category relating to that of motion is place,
especially natural
place;
it is the conception of place that lays the groundwork for the
problem of the void. Place, according to Aristotle, is not at all
like our modern conception of homogeneous three-dimensional space;
rather, it is akin to a surface or container; it is “the first
motionless boundary of what surrounds” (Phys.
IV.4,
212a21). Expanding on this a little, we can say that already in the
definition of place, Aristotle has defined it with regard to the
being of which it is the boundary: “Further, the place coincides
with the thing, for the boundaries coincide with the bounded”
(Phys.
IV.4,
212a29). This in itself will complicate the interpretation of the
void, which seems to already be foreclosed by this very definition,
and yet Aristotle still spends several chapters arguing against it;
this will be examined in more detail in section IV.

What
then is a natural
place?
Aristotle seems to think that different things have different natural
places, places towards which they tend. A heavy body tends downward,
and this is why earth is “down”; a lighter body tends upwards,
and that is why above the earth is water, above water is air, and
above air is fire; Aristotle calls this “[…] some change of place
of each of the simple bodies by nature, as with fire up and with
earth down and toward the center [...]” (Phys.
IV.8,
214b15). Aristotle seems to be attempting to account for the kind of
general ordering that we now account for with the law of gravity (and
of density, and so on). The notion of natural place will play an
important part in Aristotle’s arguments against the void.

So
what exactly is the void, and why would its existence or
non-existence be an issue for Aristotle? According to the relevant
endoxa,
the void would be “a place in which nothing is” (Phys.
IV.7,
213b30). That is, the void is generally understood to be an empty
place, “that in which there is nothing heavy or light” (Phys.
IV.7, 214a5). According to some, the void is necessary for movement
to take place, “since it would be impossible for what is full to
accept anything” (Phys.
IV.6,
213b5). Now, Aristotle will go on to argue that, far from enabling
motion, the existence of the void would make motion impossible, since
it would make motion unintelligible, but clearly motion appears to us
as intelligible: “And to those who say there must be a void if
there is to be motion, it turns out rather to be the other way around
when one examines it, that it is not possible for even one single
thing to be moved if there is a void” (Phys.
IV.8, 214b30). Before turning to these arguments, we would do well to
consider Aristotle’s methodology as it relates to this question.

The
void cannot be proven to exist using modern scientific methods. It is
quite possible to produce a vacuum with modern equipment, but this
would then not be physics
as Aristotle understands it. Physics is connected intimately with
presentation, that is, with motion. Two good pieces of evidence for
this are available in the text: first, Aristotle’s already-cited
rejection of dealing with the void as the Parmenideans have, that is,
merely defining the void as non-being and thereby excluding it
entirely by logic (in other words, by treating it as disconnected
from nature and motion);
and second, Aristotle’s rejection of conceiving of the void as a
point, writing “it would be absurd if a point were said to be a
void, for it must be a place in which there is extension for a
tangible body” (Phys.
IV.7, 214a8). If the void were a point, it could not be presented to
us in the appearance of movement; Aristotle’s immediate rejection
of this possibility indicates his commitments to thinking even the
void in these terms. Furthermore, the void must be connected not
merely to motion and presentation (that is, to appearance), but to
natural
motion. To construct an experiment is to expressly violate
nature, to produce unnatural
motion; experiments in general appear to be inapplicable to the
Aristotelian paradigm. To this effect, he writes, “[…] for what
is forced is contrary to nature, and what is contrary to nature is
secondary to what is by nature” (Phys.
IV.8,
215a5). Following the reading of Aristotle as a
proto-phenomenologist, if we want to prove the existence of the void,
we must use the appearance of nature, that is, the motion of natural
beings and of the cosmos in general, without our artificial and
violent interventions.

III. Aristotle Against the
Void

We
now turn to Aristotle’s arguments against the void as defined in
the previous section. As it turns out, this definition of the void
(as empty place) leaves two possibilities: first, the separable
or
separate
void, which exists on its own, so to speak, outside of any bodies; or
second, the inseparable
void, conceived as that whose presence inside bodies makes them
light. Aristotle goes on to argue against both of these conceptions.
The general gist of his arguments has been explicated and classified
by Alain Badiou, who writes:

The
demonstration, which is very effective, employs, one after the other,
the concepts of difference, unlimitedness (or infinity), and
incommensurability. There is great profundity in positing the void
in this manner; as in-difference, as in-finite, and as un-measured.
This triple determination specifies the errancy of the void, its
subtractive ontological function and its inconsistency with regard
to any presented multiple.2

This
analysis will deal with each of the three types of argument Aristotle
brings to bear against the void (in-difference, in-finite, and
un-measured), before briefly touching on the significance of the
“errancy” of the void that is pointed to in the last sentence of
the Badiou passage above.

Aristotle’s
first argument against the void is based on the lack of difference
within the void, which implies its subversion of motion in various
ways. Paradigmatic of this line of argumentation is the following
passage: “For just as people say that the earth is at rest because
of being evenly balanced, so also is it necessary to be at rest in
the void: for there is nowhere that a thing will be moved more or
less than anywhere else, since insofar as it is a void it has no
differences” (Phys.
IV.8,
214b33). Particularly with regard to natural motion, this will be
entirely incoherent, since a being tends towards its natural place
presumably because its natural place is different
from its current place: “But change of place by nature is
differentiated, so there is a difference by nature. Then either there
is no change of place by nature anywhere for anything, or if there
is, there is no void” (Phys.
IV.8, 215a15). But it seems obvious that there is
such
a phenomenon of natural motion, so therefore there must be no void.

This
argument leads directly to the second one regarding the in-finite,
which in many ways is an extension of the point about in-difference.
Aristotle argues that, since there is no difference in the void, a
being moved into it “will either stand still or it must be carried
into infinity, unless something stronger gets in the way” (Phys.
IV.8, 215a23). In addition to this endless motion, there is also an
infinity of possible directions
to
this motion, since no one direction can be favored over any other
(due to in-difference): “[…] so the thing will have been carried
in every direction” (Phys.
IV.8,
215a25). The main point is that in-difference leads to the in-finite
proliferation of possibilities; there is no longer a single reason
why any object in a void should do one thing as opposed to any other,
so therefore an infinity of things seems possible. This is obviously
not what we experience in the phenomenon of motion, so Aristotle
takes it as another argument against the existence of the void.

Finally,
there is the argument about un-measure, which is quite an imaginative
point. The idea seems to be that motion through a dense medium is
slower than that through a rare medium, and that the void, as an
infinitely
rare medium, destroys the ratio
whereby we can describe this difference in speed. Aristotle goes
through several possibilities (everything will move at the same
speed, or everything will move infinitely fast), indicating the
primary reason for this as a lack
of ratio:
“And to state the main point, the cause of this result is clear,
that of every motion to any other motion there is a ratio (for they
are in time, and of every time there is a ratio to any other time, if
both are finite), but of a void to the full there is none” (Phys.
IV.8, 216a9). Once again, the existence of the void would seem to
make motion unintelligible, and since motion seems clearly to be
intelligible, regulated, and even relatively predictable (we know
what to expect when we throw a rock; it won’t move at infinite
speed in all directions at once), this is yet another argument for
the void’s non-existence.

While
these three arguments would seem to clearly do away with the void
once and for all, there is one last possibility Aristotle considers:
the inseparable void. As opposed to an empty place existing
independently outside
of
beings, the inseparable void is conceived as an internal cause of
density and rarefaction, which is supposed to explain the possibility
that things have “to contract or be compressed” (Phys.
IV.9, 216b24). A rare thing, under this understanding, would have
many voids inside of it, but if it was compressed (made denser), it
would have less voids. The presence of internal voids, then, would be
the reason for light things to move upward: “[…] the void would
be a cause of motion not as that in which it happens, but just as
wineskins, by being carried upward themselves, carry what is
connected to them, so would the void carry things up” (Phys.
IV.9,
217a3). According to Aristotle, this conception suffers from just the
same problems as the separate void did (Phys.
IV.9, 217a9). However, it also suffers from a kind of reduplication
problem: how can the void itself have a change of place? The void
(and the being in which it exists) would move upward, towards the
void, but “a void then comes to have a void, into which it is
carried” (Phys.
IV.9,
217a5). Voids inside of voids seem to Aristotle an unnecessary
complication, since according to him once can positively describe
change and motion, even of the heavy and the light, without resort to
the void; however, these arguments do not concern us here and would
take us too far afield from our question of the void as name of
matter.

Now,
what all these arguments against the void do is establish its
errancy,
according to Badiou. Without getting into Badiou’s specific and
highly unique system, we can nonetheless interpret this errancy with
regard to Aristotle’s physics. The void cannot, anywhere, appear in
motion, and it cannot be implied by a phenomenological analysis of
motion. It is a strictly unintelligible concept, leading to
contradiction and paradox, whenever it is interpreted or conceived
within the bounds of possible experience (as that experience is
always given to us as an experience of motion). No, if there is to be
a void, according to Aristotle, it must not by an empty place. Might
there, then, be an understanding of the void that does not succumb to
these problems? Aristotle seems to indicate just as much in the
passages that were quoted in the introduction to this paper. The
possibility is, in a word: the void as name of matter. It is to this
problem that we now turn.

IV. ‘Void’ as Name of
Matter

We
now seek to explicate the possibilities opened up by Aristotle’s
pointing to “void” as a possible name of matter. There are three
primary passages that open up this possibility: first, the remark
about void as material of body (Phys.
IV.7, 214a15); second, the strange and difficult passage about the
wooden cube (the entire paragraph beginning around Phys.
IV.8, 216a,28); and finally, the previously-indicated “[…] unless
one wants to call the cause of being moved in general ‘void’”
(Phys.
IV.9,
217b23). Unfortunately, the first mention does not give us anything
to work with beyond a mere possibility that is immediately rejected.
So we turn to the passage about the wooden cube, and then to the
final passage of chapter 9, finally connecting these to the question
of the void in contemporary materialism.

The
paragraph about the wooden cube is extraordinarily dense, and rightly
so, for it is a feat of stupendous and dazzling abstraction. The
argument seems to go something like this. When a cube is moved into
an area containing air, it displaces
a quantity of air equal to the bulk of the cube (if it does not
instead compress it). If a cube is moved into a void, on the other
hand, it cannot displace the void, since the void is not a thing
that could be moved around. Insofar as our cube is a being that has
extension, Aristotle concludes that the void is precisely equivalent
to the cube: “So even if it were separated from all the other
things, and were neither heavy nor light, it would occupy the equal
void and be in the same place as that part of the place or of the
void equal to itself. In what way, then, will the body of the cube
differ from the equal void or place?” (Phys.
IV.8, 216b8). Pure extension, body-ness as such, distinct from all
its different qualifiers (hot, cold, heavy, light, &c.) is
equivalent to void.

Aristotle
takes this argument to disprove void in that it seems to him to make
the notion of void incoherent, since it makes it possible for two
things to occupy the same place (namely, the cube and the void).
However, this argument can also be taken not as a reductio
ad absurdum,
but as a positive argument in favor of the identification of matter
and void. But this is strange; is there a precedent for such a
conception?

According
to the Tübingen School of Plato interpretation, Plato’s unwritten
doctrines contain two principles that supposedly ground the Theory of
Forms: the One and the Indefinite Dyad.3
The One gives things unity, presses them into forms, and so on, while
the Dyad is the principle of multiplicity and of indefiniteness and
unlimitedness. What Aristotle may
have in mind with his tentative suggestion of void as matter is
something like this. The void-as-matter is the matter as
such,
as distinct and separate from form and unity. This matter is wholly
indefinite, containing contraries within itself and not resting in
either one or the other pole of difference.4
It may be called “void” for this fundamental unintelligibility,
this primordial lack with regard to definiteness and unity.

We
are now in a position to better interpret Aristotle’s final
paragraph on the void, where he presents us with his shocking
suggestion, “[…] unless one wants to call the cause of being
moved in general ‘void’” (Phys.
IV.9, 217b23). This “cause of being moved in general” is nothing
other than matter.
Things must be made of matter to move, since motion in its most
general sense is a change, a being-otherwise, and matter just is this
open potency of being otherwise (Metaphysics
Θ.8,
1050b8-28).5
Void can therefore be conceived as a kind of fundamental
indeterminacy, the name of matter as such.

What
are the implications of such a position? In particular, since
Aristotle seems to reject this possibility as unintuitive or at least
as not primary, exploring its implications affords us an important
view of the road not taken, so to speak. First, as Badiou notes,
Aristotle’s need to think void as a modification of “place”
makes him unable to conceive the nothingness or emptiness of the void
as a necessary point (more generally, non-place):

The
in-extension of a point does not make any place for a void. It is
precisely here that Aristotle’s acute thought encounters its own
point of impossibility: that it is necessary to think, under the
name of the void, the outside-place on the basis of which any
place—any situation—maintains itself with respect to its being.6

We
can understand this critique generally without embarking on an
explication of Badiou’s philosophy. What Badiou is getting at is
the importance of the void for a thinking of materialism, as the
point necessarily excluded that allows for the possibility of
inclusion
(the thing outside of presentation, itself unpresentable, that makes
presentation possible in the first place). This is materialist
because it insists on the foundation of appearance lying outside of
appearance, a fundamental limit to intelligibility and phenomenal
access, without necessarily invoking the idealist implications of the
Kantian transcendental (it is the
void as
outside, not a particular thing-in-itself).7
As Slavoj Žižek puts it:

The
ultimate divide between idealism and materialism does not concern the
materiality of existence (‘only material things really exist’),
but the ‘existence’ of nothingness/the void: the fundamental
axiom of materialism is that the void/nothingness is (the only
ultimate) real, i.e., there is an indistinction of being and the
void.8

This
is precisely
what Aristotle touches on in his passage about the wooden cube, and
what he points to in the final paragraph of his discussion of the
void. While it would be unreasonable to propose any of this as
strictly internal to Aristotle in the way it is meant here, this
possibility nonetheless coincides with the limit
to Aristotle’s thought, and the limit is certainly there in
Aristotle.
The limit of the “natural” thought of Aristotle (his necessary
connection of void and place) is here reached.9
Furthermore, it is due to Aristotle’s rigorous honesty as a thinker
that such a possibility is even pointed to, especially in such an
open gesture. Though he does not take it as the primary meaning of
the term “void,” he nonetheless addresses it as a real
possibility not reduced to utter meaninglessness—such a rejection
by definition is precisely what he accuses the Eleatics of doing. So,
paradoxically, for Aristotle his thinking by
nature
is both what enables him to reject the Eleatic mode of thought as
well as
what constrains him to think the void merely as empty place. This
is the limit to which I have referred.

V. Conclusion

While
the discussion of contemporary materialism could itself comprise many
papers of this length, the main point should at least by now be
clear: the problematic passages in Aristotle’s discussion of the
void can be read as an important opening onto materialism and as his
admission, at least in some sense, of the limits of his approach. To
reject readings wherein physics itself somehow disproves Aristotle,
and instead to read him as perfectly consistent so far as he goes—up
to the very limit of his thought, the void as name of matter—is to
make him our contemporary. This limit may be a place of profound
productivity; the connection to contemporary materialism is one that
can make the ek-static or temporally-extended reading of Aristotle as
proto-phenomenologist just a bit more compelling, as well as
complicating the one-sidedness of that phenomenology with regard to
what lies beyond.

Krämer,
Hans Joachim. Plato
and the Foundations of Metaphysics: A Work on the Theory of the
Principles and Unwritten Doctrines of Plato with a Collection of the
Fundamental Documents. Ed.
and Trans. John R. Catan. New York: State University of New York
Press, 1990. Print.

Žižek,
Slavoj. Less
Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.
London;
New York: Verso, 2012. Print.

Notes

1 Hereafter,
Aristotle’s Physics will
be cited in-line as “Phys.”
followed by the book number and chapter, then by an approximation of
the beginning line number e.g. “Phys. IV.6,
250a15.”

4 It
seems highly possible that this has a deeper relation to prime
matter; unfortunately,
exploring this might take us too far afield, so I leave that
explication for another time.

5 This
is also the reason why the Unmoved Mover is pure actuality; it is
not moved, since as pure actuality it cannot be made of matter,
since matter is this opening onto being-otherwise, i.e. potency.
Prime matter, on the other hand, is the opposite
of the Prime Mover, since it is pure potency. Furthermore, here I am
invoking an interpretation of Aristotle wherein en-mattered beings,
by their very materiality, are exposed to difference and even
non-being, the basis of which can be found, in addition to the
above-cited chapter of the Metaphysics,
in Aristotle’s discussion of time (Phys. IV.10-14).

7 For
more on this difference, the work of Slavoj Žižek
is indispensible, in particular Less
Than Nothing.
See, for example, his reading of Kant and his relation to Hegel in
the introduction of that book. Unfortunately, there is no space here
to embark on an explication of this difference, even as important as
it is.

8 Žižek,
Slavoj. Less Than
Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism,
60.

9 This
is also Badiou’s argument in his meditation on Aristotle (see
Being and Event Meditation
8).